


And in the Desolation of Death, You are All That Remains

by vinnie2757



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Noncanonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-29
Updated: 2011-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-26 17:02:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When death comes for you, what else is there to do except look and listen and try to do what you can to help the one that means the most to you?</p>
            </blockquote>





	And in the Desolation of Death, You are All That Remains

Gamzee Makara is beautiful – broken – terrifying – scared – funny – angry – quiet – confused –

Long.

Yes, that’ll do nicely.

Gamzee Makara is long. Long horns, long hair, long face, long limbs, long vowels and long laughs.

Honestly, you’re a little surprised that he hasn’t hurt himself yet; length brings with it danger for any near it, and more still for the possessor. He’s not the most careful of trolls, sweeps of substance abuse bringing a tremor to his hands that’s strong enough to wear his claws down to stubs and a laziness to his smile that defies the blood in his veins, stagnant and indigo through ash as they were. He’s not the most careful of trolls, more likely to trip over his own feet (how many times has he scared you and himself both with a careless footstep on a horn?) than he is wear more appropriate foot attire, but he’s no less dangerous for it.

He may look harmless, two sweeps away from being culled for addiction if the Condesce dared do such a thing, and you have your doubts, because this is _Gamzee _, and Gamzee is the Highblood’s descendant, you don’t need Mindfang’s journal to know that, it’s _obvious_ , and the Highblood was.__

Well, to be honest, the Highblood was a total lunatic, but okay.

But Gamzee. He’s not harmless. He’s been completely out of his hive with sopor, his movements sluggish and eyes bloodshot purple, puffed like fresh bruises and he’d still picked you and your device up like you weighed less than a Fiduspawn deck.

The first time he did it, you were kind of freaked. No, you were hella freaked. You remember making an abortive little noise in the back of your throat as you abruptly hauled a good four feet into the air and carried around like you were some kind of prince - a pretty shoddy prince, considering your carriage-carrier-troll was just one instead of four, but fucking – Gamzee. All he’d done was laugh, low and easy, and talk about the weather.

It occurred to you, as you were abruptly put down and felt the shock from the wheels of your device shoot up your spine, a peculiar mix of paralysation and sensation, that he hadn’t the faintest idea what he’d just done.

He’s laid back in such a way as you think nothing gets to him, and after a while, you start taking the hits for him, without even thinking about it. You don’t know why you do, there’s no need for it, it’s just Karkat and Equius being their usual selves and they bully you just as much, and you can’t help but think that they don’t know better. Karkat’s raging against the machine for reasons you honestly don’t know, and don’t really care to know either. Equius is just confined to the world order as it is, and remains convinced that low-bloods should remain in the gutters and high-bloods should continue to lord it out on their thrones atop your rotting corpses.

That Gamzee doesn’t adhere to this order or pay the slightest attention to the machine confuses them in ways they can’t deal with. Or at least, that’s how you’ve come to interpret it, but you’re already resigned to the fact you’ve misinterpreted their actions, which you do tend to do.

Gamzee is a high-blood and high-bloods act in very specific ways; Vriska, Equius, Eridan, they’ve all shown you that. Feferi is neither here nor there, you suppose, since she’s technically your Empress, but circumstances being what they are, she wants to change the order. She’s as much a spoke in the wheel of society as Gamzee is. Equius refuses to talk to her, of course, but he never hesitates to hound Gamzee to act more appropriate to his colour.

You know that beneath the sopor, the high-blood sits in wait, grinning and mentally mapping each blood colour of your friends, painting mental pictures with each, planning patterns to decorate his walls with. You know it, but you also know that Gamzee is willingly throwing sopor down his food chute – if you didn’t know better, you’d say he was _increasing the dose _with every sweep – because he’s terrified of that. He told you once – he’s told you a few times, actually, and he’ll probably tell you a few times more – that he’s scared of the silence, because he knows what’s in it.__

You’ve seen what happens if he steps down the dose enough to feel chilled cluckbeast over it.

You know all this, and yet still you meet his fanged grin with one of your own and answer every Trollian message he sends your way.

 **TC:** tAv, I’m KiNd Of ScArEd

 **TC:** Of ThIs PlAcE

 **TC:** wE sHoUlD hAvE a FeElInGs JaM yOu CaN’t Be MuCh MoRe ChIlL tHaN mE

 **TC:** WhAt Do YoU tHiNk?

 **TC:** tav?

 **TC:** TAV ARE YOU THERE?

 **TC:** cmon tav.

 **TC:** ANSWER ME MOTHERFUCKER I KNOW YOU’RE FUCKING ONLINE.

 **TC:** it says see, says right here.

 **TC:** TAV ANSWER ME WHERE THE MOTHERFUCKING JEGUS ARE YOU?

 **TC:** i’m coming to find you wait wherever you are, motherfucker can’t just wander off by himself.

 **TC:** IT’S NOT MOTHERFUCKING SAFE ANYMORE.

Later, you find him sat in the far corner of his respiteblock, wedged into the space behind his recuparacoon. He shouldn’t fit, but he’s all bones, sharp angles and sopor malnutrition. For a while, he ignores you, staring off into space, and you lower yourself to the floor a few strides away, legs stretched out in front of you (your joints are rusty and you haven’t found Equius yet to get them sorted. You’re kind of scared to look really.) and chest aching, sticky with blood.

‘I’m so sorry,’ you say after a few minutes of silence pass. ‘For everything.’

He looks at you then, eyes purple with burst blood vessels, pupils so small as to be pinpricks of black amidst the jelly and custard mix. You’re kind of scared, kind of worried, and kind of embarrassed, because Gamzee is in ruins, a broken mess of a troll that once had the potential to be so beautiful.

Gamzee Makara is loud – ugly – terrifying – scared – funny – angry – quiet – confused –

Broken.

Yes, that’ll do nicely.

A lifetime of sopor abuse has left him all skin and bones, and his clothes hang too loosely off what should be a broad, proud frame. His cheeks are hollow, made gaunter still by the smudges and shadows of his face paint. His eyes are sunken, too big for the rest of his features, his teeth rotten and fragile from a too high sugar intake. His skin is dry, keratin brittle, and he looks like you could break him in two by sneezing.

He’s shaking, shaking so much its rattling the recuparacoon, and you can almost see the sopor inside, what remains of it, ripple with the movements. You kind of want to drag him in there and make him sleep, force feed him decent food and take care of him, but that’s Karkat’s job. You shouldn’t have to do what Karkat should have always been doing. Gamzee’s always needed the calming presence of a moirail, and you should have been there for him in Karkat’s stead.

‘What for?’ Gamzee asks, and his voice is just as wrecked as he is, snagging on the vowels and tripping on the consonants, a vicious crash of thunder on stormy waves, and your shoulders tense before you can stop it.

He’s not looking at you so much as through you, but after sweeps together, you’re used to that. You’re used to a lot of things.

‘For everything that’s happened to you,’ you tell him, and lean forwards onto your elbows. ‘I should have – I could have – You were in so much pain and nobody bothered to – we could have helped. Karkat – me – Equius – any of us – we could have done something.’

He laughs, and it’s not a pleasant sound, a broken record of a voice. ‘I don’t give a fuck, Tav,’ he says, and waves a hand. His face paint smudges even more, but you don’t know when he touched his face. You can see your blood smudged into his cheek. ‘No fucks should be given.’

‘But.’

‘Tav,’ he says, and his eyes are sharp, narrowed, and it kind of looks ridiculous. ‘Motherfucker, listen. What happened. It’s miracles, right? Motherfucking miracles.’

But he doesn’t sound so sure.

He forces himself to his feet, and he can barely stay on them, coltish and knock-kneed, using the ridges in his recuparacoon as hand-holds, and he staggers over to collapse next to you. The tremble in the foot resting against yours rattles the plates.

Gamzee still doesn’t look at you, staring straight ahead with the kind of rigid sway you’ve come to associate with him. He rocks without moving, every bone and muscle locked tight whilst simultaneously vibrating with addictive want-want-want. Looking at him like this, in profile with his hair knotted with Nepeta’s blood and greasepaint, you can see the long, broken line of his nose from numerous one-wheeled-device accidents, and from the one time Karkat punched him in the face. His teeth still don’t sit quite in line, protruding over his bottom lip. His chin is kind of weak, you think, for a high-blood, sharp and concave and there’s a lump in his throat that you know you all have, part of what makes you able to speak, but it’s so obvious in Gamzee, skinny as he is, and reflexively you put your hand to your own throat and press worn claws to your mouth.

‘Are you alright?’

What a stupid question.

‘This motherfucker’s just fine.’

‘I know when – when you’re lying to me.’

A snarl curls the bigger troll’s lip, but he says nothing, and remains staring ahead.

‘Gamzee.’

He inhales sharp, exhales hard, and you rub your neck, tearing your eyes away.

‘I’m just. So sorry,’ you say eventually.

‘It was Karkat,’ he whispers back, and for a second, you don’t realise he’s even spoken, but you look at him, and he adds, ‘Motherfucker got his murder mode on, and took this motherfucker out of commission.’

‘I thought that you were, uh, I thought you were moirails.’

He made a harsh noise in the back of his throat. You think he might vomit. ‘So did I. But miracles work in strange ways. I ain’t got no say over them.’

You have nothing to say to that, never too sure about the miracles he was forever preaching about. How do you deal with a crisis of the faith?

For a long few minutes, you sit in dead silence, Gamzee staring off into the middle distance, and you frowning at the veins standing stark against the back of his hands as they clench into fists, grey skin stark against the white of the spots on his trousers.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ you tell him.

He says nothing.

‘Gamz,’ you begin, but break before you can even get his name out. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ you end up repeating, voice too low to be confident, but what did confidence matter anymore? You were dead and after that there’s not much reason to be scared.

He’s unresisting when you pull him into a hug, wrap both your arms about him and lift your chin to rest it on his brow, careful to keep both your horns out of the way. The last thing you need is to impale or be impaled. He’s made of iron and ice, and not even his clothes are soft.

Instead, he’s all bone, capable of breaking you in two even as you hold him close, pull him tense but unresisting into you, bone and skin and you’re dead, both of you, killed by people you loved for reasons you can’t explain, reasons that defy logic to you, because wasn’t love about acceptance? That’s what the humans were always saying, but here you were, killing each other.

And in the end, you, Tavros Nitram, are all that Gamzee Makara has left in the desolation of death. The last remnants of a faded reverie long since ruined by the waking nightmare.

**Author's Note:**

> I had severe writer's block. Holly told me about a dream she had in which she was Tavros and hugged Gamzee. This is what I did with it.
> 
> unBETA'd as usual.


End file.
